Between Scylla and Charybdis

Black Boxes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Marco J. Nathan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Model ◽  
Levels Of Explanation ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter outlines the development of the reductionism vs. antireductionism debate, which has set the stage for philosophical analyses of science since the early decades of the twentieth century. The point of departure is the rise and fall of the classical model of reduction, epitomized by the work of Ernest Nagel. Next is the subsequent forging of the “antireductionist consensus” and the “reductionist anti-consensus.” The chapter concludes by arguing how modest reductionism and sophisticated antireductionism substantially overlap, making the dispute more terminological than it is often appreciated. Even more problematically, friends and foes of reductionism share an overly restrictive characterization of the interface between levels of explanation. Thus, it is time for philosophy to move away from these intertwining strands, which fail to capture the productive interplay between knowledge and ignorance in science, and to develop new categories for charting the nature and advancement of science.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

scholarly journals Die kommunikatiewe struktuur in eietydse gereformeerde prediking – van liniêre na sirkulêre gang?

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. De Wet
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Linear Model ◽  
Spatial Model ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Simultaneous Action ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Prime Concern ◽  
Communicative Structure ◽  
Point Of Departure

Communicative structure in contemporary reformed preaching – from linear to circular process? Reformed preaching stems from a tradition in which Scripture has been viewed as the primary source for composing a sermon (the Sola Scriptura principle). In this tradition a sermon is composed starting with the exposition of the text, and then proceeding to the application of its message in the context of contemporary listeners. This process may lead to the perception that the communicative structure of this kind of preaching functions in a linear fashion. Since the second half of the twentieth century ever-stronger critical voices have surfaced against a linear communicative structure in preaching, and a tendency to emphasise listeners’ needs has manifested itself. Hermeneutical interchange between text and listener in the process of understanding has become the prime concern. The result of this new focus has been a growing trend among homiletical scholars to define and qualify the communicative structure in a sermon as a circular process. Taking note of critical voices against the traditional linear model, it is thus attempted to investigate the possibility of a third way – a way in which the authority of the message of the biblical text with the unchanging truth that proceeds from it, as well as the unique- ness of the situation of contemporary listeners is fully taken into account. The point of departure is taken in a spatial model in which the simultaneous action of listening to the text as well as to contemporary listeners is anchored in an underlying depth-structure, that is, the pneumatological anchoring of faith in the living Christ.

scholarly journals Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Guillotine, and Modern Ontological Anxiety

Text Matters ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Lacefield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley’s novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself—the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield’s interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel’s exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein’s Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical “slice” within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley’s themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences.

scholarly journals A Voice Unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's Sunless

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-49
Author(s):  
Simon Perry
Keyword(s):  
Effective Means ◽  
Pitch Organization ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Significant Achievement ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Artistic Self ◽  
Point Of Departure

Mussorgsky's Sunless cycle is aesthetically and stylistically an anomalous member of his oeuvre. Its notably effaced, pared-down, and withdrawn qualities present challenges to critical interpretation. Its uniqueness, however, renders it a crucial work for furnishing the fullest possible picture of Mussorgsky as a creative artist. The author of its texts, Golenishchev-Kutuzov (whose relationship with Mussorgsky at the time of its writing possibly extended beyond the platonic) has been identified by recent scholarship as an essential "eye-witness" for those to whom Stasov's populist characterization of the composer does not ring entirely true. Golenishchev-Kutuzov believed that in Sunless Mussorgsky first revealed his authentic artistic self. According to Golenishchev-Kutuvoz, Mussorgsky regarded his signal achievement in Sunless to have been the eradication of all elements other than "feeling." In other words, he had thrown off the stylistic shackles imposed by the aesthetics of realism and relied entirely on intuitive harmonic invention as the sole conveyor of a purely subjective, "affective" meaning in the cycle. This hypothesis forms the point of departure for an investigation of select numbers of the cycle. Analysis reveals that the affective aspect is not the only significant element operative. Alongside remnants of the realist style, there is evidence, of varying degrees of subtlety, for a knowing use of symmetrical pitch organization. Mussorgsky not only adapted the usual referential attachments of symmetrically based chromaticism--typically found in Russian operas of the second half of the nineteenth century--he also, through extremely simple but effective means, synthesized the "intuitive" harmonic and "rational" symmetrical elements of the cycle's pitch organization so that the latter emerges seamlessly out of the former. This remarkable synthesis ensures the cycle's uniformity of tone while also allowing for a reading that extends beyond the generally affective to the symbolically more specific. This symbolic level of reading offers several interpretative possibilities, one of which may refer even to the relationship of the poet and the composer. Irrespective of such potentials for interpretation, the most significant achievement in the cycle remains the synthesis of the intuitive/affective and rational/symbolic elements of its organization. Songs 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the cycle are considered in detail.

Misrepresentation of Orientals in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-258
Author(s):  
Samal Marf Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Real Image ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Real ◽  
Postcolonial Discourse ◽  
Economic Motives ◽  
At Home

      This study deals with the colonial perspectives in Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for The King (2012), according to the postcolonial approach. Although colonialism era is over by now, colonial perspectives remain strong in some literary works. Since its advent in the second half of the twentieth century, postcolonial theory confronts colonial attitudes and experiences as colonialism has been justified in many works of Western writers and scholars who have distorted the real image of non-Europeans and non-Westerners via different means and techniques in masquerade of orientalism. Postcolonial discourse opposes the misrepresentation of non-Europeans and argues that such falsification is driven by political, social, religious and economic motives. In the current study, the researcher aims at explaining the notions of colonialism, otherization and other falsified images of non-Westerners in A Hologram for the King. This paper mainly questions Eggers’s portrayal of the protagonist, Alan Clay, who after bankruptcy and failure at home, flies to Saudi Arabia and capitalizes on the physical and moral assets of the Orientals in this country to convert his story of failure to a success. The characterization of the oriental world and its setting show Eggers’s being biased against the Eastern world and ironically mirror clear hints of colonialism and eurocentrism.

Lunatic Forms

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-86
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

Dewey, John (1859–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gouinlock
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Material Substance ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood. Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence. Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy. The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself. Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Entropy and Entropy Production in Multiscale Dynamics

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Grmela ◽  
Michal Pavelka ◽  
Václav Klika ◽  
Bing-Yang Cao ◽  
Nie Bendian
Keyword(s):  
Heat Conduction ◽  
Entropy Production ◽  
Total Entropy ◽  
Approach To Equilibrium ◽  
Multiscale Dynamics ◽  
Classical Thermodynamics ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Total Entropy Production ◽  
Classical Entropy

Abstract Heat conduction is investigated on three levels: equilibrium, Fourier, and Cattaneo. The Fourier level is either the point of departure for investigating the approach to equilibrium or the final stage in the investigation of the approach from the Cattaneo level. Both investigations bring to the Fourier level an entropy and a thermodynamics. In the absence of external and internal influences preventing the approach to equilibrium the entropy that arises in the latter investigation is the production of the classical entropy that arises in the former investigation. If the approach to equilibrium is prevented, then the entropy that arises in the investigation of the approach from the Cattaneo level to the Fourier level still brings to the Fourier level the entropy and the thermodynamics even if the classical entropy and the classical thermodynamics are absent. We also note that vanishing total entropy production as a characterization of equilibrium state is insufficient.

scholarly journals La métrica de Andrés Bello

2015 ◽  
pp. 211
Author(s):  
Esteban Torre
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Andres Bello ◽  
Point Of Departure

El 15 de octubre de 2015 se cumplen 150 años de la muerte de Andrés Bello. En este trabajo –homenaje a la obra del ilustre filólogo venezolano– se estudia su original doctrina sobre la cantidad silábica, así como su concepción del verso como unidad rítmica, delimitada por la pausa final. Se lleva a cabo un detenido análisis comparativo con las ideas métricas de diversos autores de los siglos XIX y XX, partiendo de los precedentes de los siglos XV-XVIII.October 15th, 2015, marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Andrés Bello. In this tribute study of the work of the prestigious Venezuelan philologist, his individualistic doctrine on syllabic quantity is analyzed, together with his conception of the verse-line as a rhythmic unit marked off by an end-pause. A close comparative analysis is undertaken with the ideas on meter of a range of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors, while using as a point of departure those who belong to the period spanning the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

From Historicism to Historical Sociology: An Examination of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov’s Nomothetic Scheme of Historical Evolution

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-115
Author(s):  
John Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Nomothetic Approach ◽  
First Time ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Cross Fertilization

This article takes as its point of departure Thaden’s claim that the paradigm shift from historicism to historical sociology in Russian historiography at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was an abortive one. It demonstrates that Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868-1927) not only created the first post-Kliuchevskian historical sociology but that he did so using a Comtean nomothetic approach to social evolution. This is the first time that the theoretical underpinnings of Rozhkov’s interpretation of history as encapsulated in his laws of social statics have been explored in any detail. This article draws the conclusion that the positivist tradition created opportunities for cross-fertilization with other major currents of thought, including Marxism, and sheds new light on this relationship.

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